  A train on the Chicago & Northwestern Road bound for California—a long, full train—a small world on wheels. Everybody's double is aboard. The first twenty-four hours settles things. The little bursts of talk have given out. The great monotone of the wheels sounds over all. In the second twenty-four the small stock of gossip, brought along fresh, is consumed with the last crumbs of the home luncheon that was brought along with it. People begin to show their grain. One man is a bear. He falls back on the reserves, and sucks his paws for a living, and winters through the trip. He isn't a playful bruin, but he is harmless. He entered the car tolerably plump. He leaves it intolerably lean. He is a Spring bear. Another falls to devouring books—he eats as a horse eats, incessantly; he talks as a horse talks, not at all—reads right through States, Territories and deserts, over rivers, mountains and plains. He might as well have gone to the Pacific in a tunnel. See that woman in gray? A dormouse. She sleeps little naps fifty miles long, several times a day. She is an arrow of a woman—only aims at what she means to hit. A great many people are arrows: they get through the world with nothing to show for it. Her neighbor is a knitter. Click, click, go the needles all day long. She would be glad to "knit up Care's raveled sleeve," or the hose for a fire-company. Wholesome to look at with her white cap and silver hair, but no more of a traveling companion than a cat. Yonder is a motherly old lady, going to see a son in Iowa or Nebraska, and stay all winter. She lives in a house that has a lean-to and a great motherly kitchen, where they set the dough down on the hearth in its big wooden cradle, and make cider apple sauce by the barrel, and give you good, honest cheer. You can tell all this by her looks. There's an old-time Eastern grandma. If anybody had told her twenty years ago she would ever wander beyond the Missouri River, she would have thought anybody an idiot. The locomotive has done it, and is whisking her across the continent! She takes snuff. There is a faint suspicion of "Scotch" on her upper lip. She takes out the shiny black box from her black silk workbag—the shiny black box with a yellow picture of Queen Anne, or somebody in a mighty ruff, upon the cover. She holds that box in her left hand. She takes off the cover and whips it under the box with her right. She gives the side two little knocks with a knuckle. The tawny titillative sets itself aright in the box. There is something in the snuff looking like a discomfited beetle, that shakes the yellow dust off at her double knock. It is a vanilla bean. It is a liberal box—liberal as her dear old heart—and holds seventy-five sneezes! She offers it to everybody within arm's-length. A true gentleman who abominates snuff takes a dainty pinch with a smile and a "thank you." So does a genuine lady. But a saucy chit, of modern make, snuffs contemptuously without taking any, and so does a dashing sprig of a fellow who never had a grandmother, and deserves none. This Old-World courtesy over, grandma takes a pinch herself. Watch her. She touches first this side, then that, in a delicate way, with a thumb and finger, shuts her eyes, and with two long comforting snuffs disposes of the allowance. Mrs. James Madison was a lady. So is grandma. Mrs. James Madison took snuff and displayed two handkerchiefs, one for preliminaries, and the other, as she herself said, "for polishing off." So does grandma. One is cotton and blue, and the other is cambric and white. She sneezes. God bless her! Her life has been as harmless as a bed of sage, and as wholesome as summer-savory. Is it a sin to take snuff? Not for grandma. There is no Bible prohibition for anybody, and not because Sir Walter Raleigh lived a while after Bible times, either. Neither were there railroads then, but here is an injunction to railway travelers, in case of accidents, as old as Hebrew: "Their strength is in sitting still!" The writer saw a man leave a car because it had broken loose from a train, jump head-first against a wood-pile, and knock his brains out. To make a cautious statement, he thinks those brains were a severe loss to the owner. The writer has seen a man weighing fourteen stone try to climb into the hat-rack to get out of harm's way, when the train left the track. Had the car turned over, there would have been another heavy cerebral calamity. Yonder is a party of four around a little table. You catch fragments of talk about "decks" and "right-bowers," as if they were sailors ashore; "clubs," as if they were policemen; "kings" and "queens," like so many royalists; "going to Chicago," when they are all bound West; "tricks," as if they were conjurors. Then a laugh, somebody says "euchre!" and the game and the secret are out together. An old man in a home-spun coat and a puzzled face watches the quartette. It is all Greek to him. He used to play "old sledge" when he was a boy, on the hay-mow of a rainy afternoon and nothing to do. The quaint face cards look familiar, but their conduct is inexplicable. A man needs about as many resources on a long railway journey as Robinson Crusoe needed on that island of his. He wants a "man Friday" of some sort. If, like Mark Twain's Holy Land mud-turtles, he cannot sing himself, he must know how to make others sing. Have you never met a man who was a sort of diachylon plaster? Who drew you out in spite of yourself, and put you at your best, till you were not quite sure what he had been doing to you? That man knows how to travel. Two prime qualities go to the make-up of a successful tourist: the art of seeing and the art of listening. If, added to these, he understands the art of telling, then he is a triumph in a locomotive way. But the wheels are beating the iron bars like a hundred hammers. It is a November night, and the icy rain drives sharply against the windows. The out-look is dreary enough. The Argumentative Man—there is almost always one on board—has gone to sleep. You know him. He's the man who sits upon the seat in front of you, and overhears you make some statement to a friend—perhaps doctrinal. Your Argumentative Man is strong on doctrine. He wheels about on the seat, throws one leg over the arm, and picks you up. He addresses you as "Neighbor," or "Stranger,"—possibly "Colonel." If the last, you know whence he comes, and wish he would make himself the second, and are glad he is not the first. But he begins upon you. He quotes Paul at you, or Isaiah, or Genesis, or somebody. He crows over you. He gets upon his hind feet, and stands in the aisle and raises his voice, and looks around upon the half-dozen within ear-shot to challenge their admiration when he thinks he makes a point. He is the man that always lays his argument upon the thumb-nail of his left hand, leveled like an anvil, and then forges it every second or two with the thumb-nail of his right hand, and when he thinks he has you fast just holds one nail on the other a little while, as if it were you he had finished and was holding there till you got cool. That man is exasperating. It is next to impossible to be a Christian where he is, and very hard to be a decent man. They give penny-royal tea to bring out the measles. He is a decoction of human penny-royal, and brings to the surface all the ill humors there are in you. Sometimes your Argumentative Man is a clergyman, sometimes a layman, but you wish the train was a ship bound for Tarshish, and the Man's name was Jonah, and a convenient whale alongside, though you are sorry for the whale—but then we are all selfish, if we are not whales! But the Man is asleep, and the knitting-work put away, and the cards have had their last shuffle, and grandma is dreaming of home, and ever so many more are gazing up at the car lights in a stupid way, or looking out through the blank windows at—nothing. The man with the black bottle is low-spirited, so is the bottle, and he has settled his head down between his shoulders—shut up like a telescope. It is all dull and stupid enough. There are two women seated together, plain women, say forty-five or fifty years old. They have good, open, friendly faces. Plainly dressed, modest, and silent save when they conversed with each other, you had hardly noticed them. Perhaps there was the least touch of rural life about them. They would make capital country aunts to visit in mid-summer, or mid-winter for that matter. If they were mothers at all, they were good ones. So much you see, if you know how. Well, it was wearing on towards twelve o'clock—the reader is requested to believe that this is no fancy sketch—when through the dull silence there rose a voice as clear and mellow and flexible as a girl's, of the quality that goes to the heart like the greeting of a true friend. It belonged to one of those women. She sat with her white face, a little seamed with time and trouble, turned neither to the right nor the left, seemingly unconscious that she had a listener. They were the old songs she sang—the most of them,—songs of the conference and the camp—such as the sweet young Methodists, and Baptists withal, with their hair combed back, used to sing in the years that are gone. First it was "Rock of Ages! cleft for me," and then, "Our days are gliding swiftly on." The clear tones grew rounder and sweeter. Those that were awake listened; those that were asleep awoke all around her. Some left their seats and came nearer, but she never noticed them. A brakeman, who had not heard a "psalm tune" since his mother led him to church by the hand when he was a little boy, and who was rattling the stove as if he were fighting a chained maniac, laid down the poker and stood still. Then it was: "A charge to keep I have," and so hymn after hymn, until at last she struck up: The car was a wakeful hush long before she had ended; it was as if a beautiful spirit were floating through the air. None that heard will ever forget. Philip Phillips can never bring that "home of the soul" any nearer to anybody. And never, I think, was quite so sweet a voice lifted in the storm of a November night on the rolling plains of Iowa. It is a year ago. The singer's name, home and destination no one learned, but the thought of one listener follows her with an affectionate interest. Is she living? Surely singing, wherever she is. I bid her Godspeed. She charmed and cheered the November gloom with carols of the Celestial City. She passed with the full dawn of the coming morning out of our lives, and there is a strange ache at the heart as we think so. Whoever heard her that night could write her epitaph. They could say—they could write: SACRED |
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